A customer wants user-level consumption tracking to prevent abuse of their AI product. What approaches are available?
A real customer ask from the field, and a layered design question in disguise: attribution, budgets, anomaly detection, and enforcement, plus the attribution problem that decides whether any of it works.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A real customer ask from the field, and a layered design question in disguise: attribution, budgets, anomaly detection, and enforcement, plus the attribution problem that decides whether any of it works.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
